Guest post by Jacqueline Quintanilla Aker, Senior Vice President, Health & Multicultural Marketing at Edelman

Every public engagement campaign should be grounded in research data. Impact is built on the foundation of learning and understanding your audience, and on achieving real, measurable change. Data allows us to develop strategies that can change behaviors, influence opinions, motivate a community to action, and shift social norms. Data enables an organization to deliver the right message, at the right time, in the right place, and from the right messenger – a trusted source with the power to persuade action. This is done by listening to your audience and identifying the best way to reach them, whether it’s through an article in a newspaper, an event in their local community, or an online social community.

LIVESTRONG, for example, recently engaged an independent research firm to conduct market research that helped inform the media strategy for its Hispanic/Latino outreach program. Data from a series of focus groups and a telephone survey with Hispanics/Latinos in seven priority markets in the U.S. helped to identify awareness levels of LIVESTRONG and its services, determine beliefs and misconceptions regarding cancer survival and treatment, and determine the most effective communication channels for reaching Hispanics/Latinos in the U.S. Furthermore, LIVESTRONG also leveraged existing data from publicly available studies from the American Cancer Society and the National Institutes of Health about prevalence of cancer in the Hispanic community and awareness of cancer resources to complement the data from its focus groups and telephone survey. Both sources of data were invaluable in the development of the overall media elements and messages that addressed issues relating to cancer in this community, such as cancer stigma and financial and emotional support.

Data can also be used by organizations to set benchmarks by which to measure a campaign over time. This is particularly important for social marketing campaigns that are meant to affect behavior change, such as encouraging a population to stop smoking, getting people to get screened for heart disease or prostate cancer, or reducing drug use in a particular community.

In 2008 for example, the California Department of Alcohol & Drug Programs (CDADP) launched a social marketing campaign to reduce methamphetamine use in the state among the LGBT community. The state identified the LGBT community as a target audience by reviewing existing data that showed that this was a population at risk for methamphetamine use. CDADP conducted a benchmark survey at the onset of the campaign to determine perceptions about, and prevalence of, meth use in the state. Six months after the launch, the same survey was conducted among the target population to gauge whether or not the campaign had changed behavior. The data showed that 40 percent of respondents ranked the state’s anti-meth campaign as the main message they heard about relating to meth in 2008 and that the campaign indeed had encouraged meth users to seek help.

Obtaining data from your public engagement campaigns can help you analyze audience recall of your campaign message, awareness and understanding of the issue, and behavior change that may result from your initiative. Whether you’re using data to inform a program or to evaluate its effectiveness, data can be used as a very powerful tool to provide a framework by which to communicate with stakeholders, decision makers, and the public about a particular service, product, or brand.